The Trixie Update

There were a million reasons I quit the blog 4 months ago. Here’s a handful.

I had grown completely tired of the site. I wasn’t interested in writing about baby data anymore. I was interested in writing my baby data software and working as an User Interface (UI) designer. I had different creative needs and I felt completely trapped by the scope of the blog. That kept me from being excited about working on it.

I worried about diluting existing content. As a blogger, I didn’t post every little thing that popped in my head and I certainly didn’t post on a daily basis (except photos). I was lucky to write a 2-3 stories a month. But I was very happy with the quality of the stories I wrote. Many had accompanying graphics, and almost all turned over in my head for a while before posting. They were all refined pieces (except some of the really early stuff) and that high standard became a disincentive for me to write more stories (unless I thought the story was going to be really, really, really good). It was hard to overcome that feeling.

I wasn’t able to experiment anymore. The stories on the Trixie Update had become so finished and tied to a very specific narrative (new parents raising a human baby) that I couldn’t try new writing or directions.

Trixie started fighting me tooth and nail on the photography. It was probably a stage and had nothing to do with the site, but without the TPODs there wasn’t anything new on the site. Trying to get a photo became a coercive activity and I really didn’t enjoy being in that position, so I quit. After I stopped the blog, I didn’t take any pictures for 2 months and enjoyed the break immensely. Now, however, the bug is back. I’m looking to sell my current camera and upgrade.

There was too much of a disconnect between the way I felt and what I posted on the site. I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid writing anything personal on the site. My goal had always be to simply observe. There’s plenty of hard data which some many consider personal (diaper counts, anyone?), but there’s not any emotional revelations. I got to the point that I was tired of posting and tired of not being able to say I was tired of posting.

Some old RSI (repetitive stress injury) issues started to flare up again. This was a show-stopper. The last thing I wanted to do was spend extra time photoshopping a TPOD if my arms were hurting at the end of the day. This is a completely manageable condition, and I’m doing 99% better now. Of course I wish I didn’t have it at all, but I will say that it’s forced me to work smarter over the years. It also helped me kick the Starcraft habit back in 2002.

A lot of these reasons are now resolved. My goal is to have fun writing and stop worrying. I also feel recharged to a certain degree. I add that qualifier because I’m also exhausted from my job, parenting and running my own business, but I feel pretty good about everything and glad to be back in the saddle. Incidentally, all of the above issues can be bullet-pointed as impediments to creativity. I want to flesh out some of these ideas here the future.

Lately Trixie has been using her imagination to take a word or an expression and contort it into either a nonsense word or an outright substitute. For example, I’ll say, “We’re having dinner guests tonight.” She will declare, “I call dinner guests, Spinner Chips”. I love seeing what she comes up with.

Last night at our regular Monday-night-kid-eats-free venue, Trixie was not using good manners. Jennifer had just refilled her water and we were waiting for a ‘thank you’. Trixie danced around (literally) with a variety of gibberish before she decided on ‘Stegosaurus’ with a wink.

I had finally had enough and told Trixie it was over. She was going to be PUNISHED — no TV. The fallout was immediate, but not entirely predictable. Trixie turned red and started bawling. I picked her up to give her some security, and told her that we love her, but that she should have used good manners. That point was lost on her. “I SAID STEGOSAURUS!!,” she howled, tears pouring down her face. “I SAID STEGOSAURUS…”

At that moment, she believed with all her heart (which was beating a million times a minute) that Stegosaurus was the right thing to say. I relented and gave her another chance, but also a gentle reminder that ‘thank you’ is really better for most situations. She gave Jennifer a hug, a regular, non-nonsensical ‘I’m sorry’, and the rest of the night went ok.

One of the directions I’ve steadily been moving over the last 6 months is away from my desktop. By this I mean my dependence on any single computer. Instead I’ve embraced web applications and the network for as much of my daily routine as is practical.

I wasn’t very mobile when I was staying home watching Trixie or working at home on Trixie Tracker. I didn’t have a need for mobility. Everything changed once I started working as a contractor again. Suddenly I was trying to manage and synchronize data across multiple machines and not having a lot of fun with it.

Here’s a couple of highlights from my switch from the computer to network:

Email: I’ve managed my own email domains since 1999. And I’ve had the same email address — benmac@artshare.com — for about eight years now. So it was with great deliberation that I decided to switch over to Google’s Gmail. There were two main reasons for the move:

1) I needed to consolidate my email and get access to all of it in one place no matter where I happened to be. I started by first forwarding all my accounts to Gmail. But after a few months I realized that Gmail was good enough to replace my personal accounts. So I started using it as my primary email account. Contact me at ben.macneill@gmail.com .

2) I was tired of losing the spam war. I was sick of trying to manage email spam from the server side. It was a waste of my time, and I took absolutely no pleasure in trying to beat spammers. I gave up. On the other hand, Google is absolutely amazing at killing spam. No one on the whole planet does it better. See, Google is so awesome, I have no qualms about publishing my email address above. Side note: Is Google evil? Maybe… But they also rock. And I’m more than happy to take that chance.

Bookmarks: del.icio.us is such an amazing tool, I can’t begin to describe it. In its most limited scope, it’s an app that allows you to move your bookmarks to a web page instead of limited to a specific browser on a specific computer. However, if you embrace all its features it becomes a collaboration tool that allows you to share and exchange ideas and and information with a network of friends or complete strangers in real time. I highly recommend it. If you are interested, here’s what I’m looking at: http://del.icio.us/chillnc

Baby tracking: I was using 2 or 3 different baby tracking desktop clients between home and work as well as little scraps of paper scrawled with nap notes wadded up in my pockets. It was impossible to synchronize everything. I also couldn’t believe how bad diaper spam had gotten. But then I discovered this amazing little web application…

Since I’m serious about starting bloggin again, there are a number of technical issues that need to be addressed.

RSS: If you are reading this as a feed, you may be a little irked that you are only getting a partial…

(this joke is for RSS viewers)

… feed. I hear your pain.

Back when I was actively working on the site, I didn’t care too much about my RSS feed. I set my own publishing schedule and if folks didn’t want to drop by and visit, then that’s their problem. Partial feeds were the default when I installed, and I never gave them a second look.

However, I recognize that the technology landscape has changed since I last thought about the blog architecture. “Wait a minute!”, you say. “You stopped blogging about 4 months ago — feed syndication hasn’t changed that much since then.” True. However, I haven’t thought much about blog technology since late 2003.

If you like to read blogs, but are totally lost right now, allow me to explain a cool technology that may change your life.

There are two ways to find out if something new has been posted to Trixie Update. The first way is to point your browser to www.trixieupdate.com and see if anything has changed since your last visit. This method fails miserably when a writer decides to shut down a blog (for, let’s say, about 4 months) and then starts it back up again. If you are a dedicated reader, then maybe you check back a few times or for a few weeks, but eventually you’ll come to believe that the blog is truly dead and stop visiting.

The second way to keep up with a blog is to get a personally notified when a new article is posted. This is accomplished using a syndication tool. Most every blog publishes a list of recent posts called a feed. You can get yourself a feed reader (I recommend Google Reader) and add a list of your favorite blogs to it. When a blog on your list is updated it shows up in your list. Now you don’t have to run around checking to see if your favorite blogs have been updated. Instead you’ll get an immediate notification when a new post (or Picture of the Day) is published.

I wanted to introduce this second option because I know a number of my readers aren’t familiar with feeds. Those are the dedicated folks who have been checking in over the last 4 months to see if anything has changed. To those folks, I thank you for continuing to check in, but I hope that you’ll check out Google Reader so that you can save some time should I take another hiatus.

Back to the folks who use RSS readers. I’ll fix the issue soon. We will have full feeds.

Long story short, I lost a bet with my boss.

Long story: A lot has changed over the last 9 months. No - not that kind of 9 months. I launched a commercial company. I started freelancing again, hard-core. The free-lance turned into a full-time technology job in Raleigh. Trixie started a full-time preschool. We moved to our first house (still living in Chapel Hill). I’m also still actively running and working on Trixie Tracker in what little spare time I have. It has been a busy time.

The people I work with are extremely technology saavy. I’m the designer in a room full of super-smart folks who can all be simultaneously considered engineers, programmers, developers, coders and general technologists. It’s a pretty cool seat to have at the table. My boss in particular is a very smart guy who is extremely interested in all aspects of technology, education, information organization and social systems.

During a recent conversation with my boss, he prodded the non-blogging employees (there’s only 2 of us left) to start bloggin again. He’s been working on a blog himself which is steadily moving up in the technorati ranks.

I got curious about the Trixie Update’s rank so I checked it out. I out-ranked his by about 7,000 points. I proudly decided that I would start bloggin again when he outranked me on Technorati. I like competitions.

However, during the process of setting my technorati profile, I had to create a post to get pinged. That single ping caused technorati to recalibrate my ranking (which had been frozen for the last 5 months or so). Within an hour, my rank dropped about 20,000 points. It’s always good to keep bets with your boss, so I’m back in business.

Question: What the hell is Technorati?
Answer: It’s a service that ranks the popularity of blogs.

This is a post to force me to follow through with plans to start blogging again. However, it’s not necessarily going to be a continuation of the Trixie Update. (but I’m sure there will be some Trixie stuff.)

It’s probably going to deal more with professional stuff or business stuff or design stuff or social stuff or chapel hill stuff or maybe even the perennial favorite, ‘what my cat did today’ (assuming I can actually get my hands on a cat for blogging purposes). Anyway… the goal is start something up and the best way to do it is to just do it.

For the die-hard visitors, I do promise to get a few new Trixie pics up soon. Thanks for sticking around!

This isn’t anything real special, but they look pretty nice if you are in a bind (like me). Print on a regular piece of white paper using any old ink jet. Trim at 1/8″. Feel free use and share. Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

Snowman Present Tags: Download (PDF format, 250k)

The Trixie Update is soon coming to an end. It has been a three-year labor of love, and we’ve enjoyed sharing a special part of our life with the world. However, Trixie is only getting older, and I feel more and more protective of her (and my family) as she has grown from a human baby into a fully formed independent being. There will probably be a few more pictures coming, some of Trixie, some not, but I’m not making any promises about updating the site, or what the site may become. On a side note, we’re not pregnant and we haven’t been on vacation. Sometimes things just come to an end without much fanfare.

Update: Monday 9/11/06 10:00pm
Here’s a few more notes:
1) I’m not taking the site down. The archives will be up indefinitely.
2) I’m keeping the domain name too. When she wants it, I’ll give it to her. Check back in 5-10 years. It will be Trixie’s own blog then 3) Thanks to everyone for all the heartfelt comments. It really means a lot.

Trixie likes all arts-n-crafts, but she loves pencils. She likes me to sharpen them and she likes the eraser — or at least the idea of it. I hadn’t really seen her erase anything very well until I came across my barely recognizable shopping list today. Trixie had carefully erased each item, and then for good measure she scribbled all over the rest of the page.

It wasn’t a spectacular list or anything — there were only three items: wipes, coffee filters and brita — but it’s really disturbing to find your work completely vanished.

I’m so exhausted after the non-stop birthday celebration that The Trixie Update is taking a little break this week. We’ll be back on Monday.